One Work Book Launch: General Idea: Imagevirus

To celebrate the launch of General Idea: Imagevirus, a new book by Gregg Bordowitz for Afterall Books' One Work series, Artists Space is hosting a discussion between Bordowitz and General Idea member AA Bronson.

Imagevirus started in the mid-1980s, when AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, working together as General Idea, created a symbol using the acronym AIDS, boldly arranging the letters in a manner that resembled Robert Indiana's LOVE logo. This launched a series of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, exhibitions and ephemera that from 1987 to 1994 used the mechanism of viral transmission to investigate the term AIDS as both word and image.

In the book, Gregg Bordowitz, an artist and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, analyses Imagevirus from the perspective of his own involvement with activist art initiatives in New York during the 1980s and 90s. Reconsidering the battles fought over sexuality and representation in those years, he explores how Imagevirus infected urban spaces across the world, offering a new model for artistic production, one strongly suited to ideological struggle.